"You live in a country where it is illegal to express certain mathematics in software, where state apparatchiks regulate all innovation, where inconvenient science is criminalized, where whole avenues of experimentation and research are shut down in the service of a half-baked superstition about the moral qualities of your three laws, and you call my home corrupt? Arturo, what happened to you? You weren't always this susceptible to the Big Lie."
--from Cory Doctorow's "I Robot"
You know, I've been mooching off of Cory Doctorow's free work for years. Never paid him a dime. He's one of them information is free DRM resistance is futile kind of guys who, and this is a credit to his fortitude, puts out most of his work without charge. Go look. It's true. I can't tell you how much fun it is to pan a novel when I wasn't given a complimentary copy. Still, I know of this slight pang called "guilt". So, when IDW publishing started a series called "Cory Doctorow's Futuristic Tales" I decided to say thank you by buying all five issues of the six issue series that have been published so far. It was thanks not just for having the courage to test his theory that free copies don't hurt sales but also as thanks for his great copyleft reporting at Boing Boing. They're not quite in the Alan Moore league or as courageous as Black Summer but they're pretty good. The last issue, part of a series of short stories that rework classic science fiction motifs (You might recall Isaac Asimov's robot stories and his three laws of robotics...Warren Ellis has his own version of the three laws which are funny and will probably be true.) is definitely the best, fully realized of the batch. It also recycles a common meme in Cory's work or the idea that you might be able to upload your consciousness into other bodies. Or: we would become the Cylons, or at least the ones who can pass for humans. Terrific read. I also was quite impressed with Nimby and the Dimension Hoppers. The covers have been beautiful as well. Highly recommended. And: thanks Cory for showing us a new way. I'm not sure if he's one of the best science fiction writers but he's certainly one of the best people in science fiction.
Philip Shropshire
www.threeriversonline.com